John McAfee’s neighbour complained of gun shots, ‘roguish behaviour’ next door a week before being found dead

John McAfee's neighbour complained of gun shots next door week before being found dead

The multi-millionaire inventor of McAfee antivirus software is being hunted by Belize authorities after an alleged rival was found shot to death, according to news reports.

John McAfee, 67, is wanted for questioning in the death of Gregory Faull, a Florida contractor who was discovered in a pool of blood at his home in the Central American country with an apparent gunshot wound to the back of his head, according to local police reports.

A week before his death, the contractor had filed a formal complaint with local authorities alleging that the antivirus pioneer had fired off guns and demonstrated “roguish behaviour” — allegedly over an issue of dogs, according to Gizmodo.

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Before he became wanted for questioning, Mr. McAfee was interviewed by a reporter from Gizmodo who detailed a life that had allegedly descended into an odyssey of drugs, guns and isolation.

“I just know that McAfee alienated a lot of people around him. Frankly, I was surprised to hear that he was still living there,” Mr. Faull’s wife, Vicki Faull, told CNET on Monday, soon after being told that the tech entrepreneur could have played a role in the death of her husband.

Mr. McAfee got his start as an antivirus pioneer in the mid-1980s, when he began travelling the United States in a Winnebago, manually debugging virus-plagued computers. He soon automated many of his techniques in a software program that germinated into McAfee Incorporated.

When Mr. McAfee cashed out in 1994, his fortune reportedly peaked at $100 million.

A spate of smaller tech startups followed, as well as a series of ever-more flamboyant leisure pursuits: Yoga trips to Nepal and his pioneering work in “aerotrekking,” an extreme sport that uses high-powered ultralights for low-altitude flight.

The sport ultimately claimed the life of his 22-year-old nephew and a 61-year-old passenger in 2007, after they got their air vehicle caught in a spiral dive and plummeted into the desert.

Within months of the crash, Mr. McAfee began pulling up stakes in the U.S. He auctioned off a $1.5-million property in Hawaii, a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado and finally sold off his New Mexico aerotrekking base at a 90% loss.

The “absurdity of my consumption came home to rest,” Mr. McAfee wrote in a 2009 letter to The New York Times. “Two years ago I began divesting myself of the heaviest of my excesses. I began to give my stuff away.”

He moved to a compound in Orange Walk, Belize, and outfitted it with an advanced chemistry laboratory, purportedly to purify world-altering medicines from jungle plants. His herbal drug plan later collapsed.

For protection, Mr. McAfee hired a small army of private security guards.

In a story last week, Gizmodo painted Mr. McAfee as a man wracked by paranoia, to the point where he openly negotiated with local gangsters in order to ensure his safety. “Everyone who has tried to rob me, kill me, works for me now,” he said, alleging that, in the last year alone, he had dodged 11 robbery and murder attempts.

Jeff Wise, the reporter who broke the story for Gizmodo, told Foxnews.com, “Around the time his herbal drug plan collapsed, he started to get really heavily into this kind of synthetic, hallucinogenic hyper-aphrodisiac. Everyone was scared of McAfee. He was walking around the beach carrying a gun.”

Only five months ago, 43 members of Belize’s Gang Suppression units stormed onto Mr. McAfee’s compound, shot his dog and began smashing their way into buildings with a sledgehammer, screaming through a megaphone that they were looking for illegal drugs and firearms.

Police indeed found an arsenal of pistols and shotguns – as well as a half-dressed Mr. McAfee and his 17-year-old girlfriend — but all of the weapons were legal.

“This is clearly a military dictatorship where people are allowed to go and harass citizens based on rumour alone,” Mr. McAfee told Channel 5 Belize after the raid.